The Very Real Things I Bought to Recover Post-Baby

When you get pregnant, and then have a baby, you're automatically granted membership into a secret club. In it, women tell you things. Intimate things. Everyone from your own mother to strangers on the subway offers advice and unsolicited stories about their general pregnancy woes, their breastfeeding struggles, and then, when you look like you're about to pop, friends and strangers alike offer up their terrible tales of labor.

I wondered why it took getting pregnant for women to share these stories with me—having a child is one of the most powerful physical and emotional experiences a woman can go through, yet most of us only find out the details after we embark on that journey ourselves. Perhaps, if these stories were more widely known, postpartum care in this country would not be so abysmal.

And on a more personal level, if we don't share these stories—if we don't laugh about them and bond over the shared experiences—we are left isolated and afraid.

So in the interest of creating greater awareness (and some laughs, too) around the very real physical trauma that the "miracle" of childbirth brings to bear on a mom, here's a list of things I bought off Amazon in the days leading up to and following giving birth.